UrbanTurf usually stays away from publishing rankings or lists…except at the end of the year when we look back at all DC’s residential real estate scene had to offer during the previous 12 months. So, this week, we are looking at not only the best, but the most intriguing and peculiar things that came across our radar over the course of the past year.

It seems that in recent years, no news gets DC as excited as the impending arrival of a vaunted restaurant institution from another city. That held true this year as well.

On April Fools Day, UrbanTurf learned that Eataly, the massive Italian gourmet market-bar-restaurant from the likes of Mario Batali in New York City, had signed a letter of intent for around 35,000 square feet of retail space at the massive Capitol Crossing project planned for above I-395 of Massachusetts Avenue NW (map) from developer Property Group Partners.

For years, there had been talk that Eataly might be coming to DC, but this was the first concrete sign that the project was moving forward.

Confirmation of our confirmation came in the months that followed. In late April, Eataly founder Oscar Farinetti said that DC was in the company’s expansion plans. And in October, when the City Paper inquired about Eataly, Jeff Sussman, the president of Property Group Partners, said simply “We stand in good shape with that. They’ll be coming.”

Now, it should be noted that Capitol Crossing, the 2.2 million square-foot, $1.3 billion project planned around and over the Center Leg Freeway portion of I-395 (map), is still several years from completion.

And to make things even murkier, Capitol Crossing has been in the headlines a lot over the past month, specifically after a request from the developer to close a section of 395, which would speed up the construction timeline by about 18 months. The mayor put the kibosh on that plan, so the arrival of Capitol Crossing and Eataly anytime before 2018 now seems quite optimistic.

Still, we know that the vast majority of DC residents will welcome Eataly whenever it decides to show up — the day we broke the news in April was the largest day of traffic to UrbanTurf ever.